millions of dollars -- a cost makes one-fifth of 1% of output looks like a minuscule fraction so that the kennard, which of course was spread by milton freedman about the cost of the gold standard, that is to say the provision of the monetary standard in gold mining, was too much for society to bear. and, of course, he promoted floating exchange rates which we now have today, floating exchange rates have produced a system where the cost of output is substantially higher than it was under the gold standard, not to mention that almost every three or four years the variation in the value of foreign exchange can be as much as 20%. so the entire national economy, its workforce, its labor wages, its costs of production, can vary by as much as 15% to 20% in a very short period, which causes enormous misallocations of resources, which by itself is a cost substantially greater than the steady price level and economic growth produced under the classical gold standard. there's one other comment that edward made, and in a word the process of exploring and discovering and mining gold and its effect upon the p